Good Movie Review On Rabbit-Proof Fence

The film ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence,’ is the story of three young Aborigines who dared to challenge the extreme and hostile terrains of the Australian bush country and desert to escape from captivity to freedom. The movie is touching and deals with cultural anthropology to the hilt. Right from the onset when the camera runs across a spectrum of barren land and reaches the eyes of an innocent girl who looks at the distant mountains and the bird in the sky with an emerging smile, the viewers are quickly moved to understanding that the eyes talk of the crave for freedom. On the subject of cultural anthropology, this movie, ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence,’ signifies the life of the Aborigines from the early part of twentieth century to the present and their struggle with the whites for social and cultural equality. As cultural anthropology seeks to answer questions like who are ‘primitives,’ and who are ‘civilized,’ the movie clearly reflects that it is the Aborigines who are civilized and the whites who are primitives. Through the cultural conflicts that involve whites and Aborigines, the acts of discrimination and suppression have clearly shown the primitiveness of the white Australians.
Right through the movie, there are references made to the Aborigines as ‘the third race, and half castes,’ and these remarks are symbolic of labeling a certain section of people as ‘primitives.’ For hundreds of years, the Aborigines have been isolated and castigated from civilization by the white settlers. The Aborigines are the native of Australia and it was when the English sent their prisoners to Australia to damnation that the prisoners began to build homes for themselves and made the country their home. Without going into this event in detail, the whites were more knowledgeable and used the available land to build small towns and then cities over a period of time. It was when aborigines began to move into their habitat that whites realized that these people were primitive and not worthy of sharing space with.
In the beginning of the movie, a caption reads, “for hundred years the Aboriginal people have resisted the invasion of their land by white settlers,” and another one that read, “the whites introduced a special law that targeted the Aborigines, called the Aborigines Law,” which was well planned and executed to control the lives of the Aborigines in every detail. On watching the movie, one gets a feeling that there is a misinterpretation of the term ‘civilized,’ and ‘primitive.’ Through the characterization of the three children, one gets to understand who the ‘civilized’ lot are and who the ‘primitive’ ones. Suppression of a particular tribe cannot be termed as civilized and this is precisely what one sees in the movie. However, this is not to say that all the whites are guilty of such acts. The three girls, on their way home from the camp, are helped by a white family who give them food and clothes and there is the man who mends the fence who talks to the girls without any inhibition.
The irony is that while the depiction of racism is clearly evident in the movie, such acts are not uncommon across the world. The whites have for centuries outlawed the darker-skinned people and kept them in bonded labor, like the Americans did to Black Africans, whom they took back to the U.S to work in sugar cane fields and in tending to agriculture and the British, who controlled countries across Asia till they won independence. Such acts cannot be termed as civilized. The rabbit-proof fence is another symbolic gesture of inequality and discrimination of people based on their caste, color and creed. When Molly asks the man at the fence the question, “How far does this fence go?’ he says, “All the way to the top of Australia where it meets the sea. It’s about 1500 miles long and keeps the rabbits this side of the fence.” This clearly shows the discriminating nature of the whites who don’t want the rabbits (read Aborigines) to cross the fence and move into their (whites) cities and towns. There are many incidents that invoke incivility. In one scene in the movie, a group of white women are shown slides and the presenter asks the women, “are we to allow the creation of a third kind?” In another scene, when the three children are taken to the camp, when Gracie speaks to Molly in her native language, the nun tells her, “We don’t use that junk (language) here. We speak English.” When Gracie is caught and the search for Molly and Daisy continues, the officer says, “The two half-caste girls are still at large.”
At the height of white supremacy in Australia, Aborigine children were forcibly removed from their parents and brought to camps where they were taught to be obedient and serve their white masters till the 1970s. Their acts demanded global condemnation, as Aborigines were robbed of their land and homes and the whites used their might to destruct their identity, family life and culture. Were the whites civilized in their attitude and the Aborigines ‘primitives’ in their struggle for equality? How could Australia’s aboriginal eradication program; a demonstration of a ‘civilized’ society who see themselves as decent and self-righteous, disrupt a culture that they deem is inferior to them? The movie is a reflection of how the so-called civilized society discriminates the primitive Aboriginal society. This movie brings to light the brutal and unethical policies of white Australians till the 1970s, and is a true story of Molly, Daisy and Gracie Craig. The movie starts with the narrator, presumably Molly; talking about her and her sisters’ ordeal at the camp and how she and Daisy managed to escape and rejoin their family. However, its sad to note that Gracie is not with them in the need when the two elderly ladies are shown together. What happened to Gracie can only be speculated as was the case of the hundred others who were forcibly taken by the whites.